ONE OF US: His health battle led him to create some fun to help sick children cope

By The Times-Union,

Grant Prather was 4 months old the first time he says his doctor "told my parents it might be wise to begin making my funeral arrangements."

By the time he was 8, he had been in and out of Jacksonville hospitals and was aware that a diagnosis of cystic fibrosis was, for many children, a death sentence.

Fear, anxiety and anger are emotions any child in that situation must deal with. But, as Prather, now a 23-year-old sophomore at the University of North Florida, remembers it, boredom was his worst enemy.

That's when he and his mother, JoAnne, began inventing games as a way to combat boredom and "to keep from going out of our minds."

As Prather explains on his Web site, www.thebigfunbox.org/, "sometimes the best way to deal with the unimaginable is to imagine something else."

A lot has changed for Prather in recent years.

Advances in medical science made it possible for doctors to perform a double lung transplant on Prather in 2000.

That transplant didn't cure his irreversible condition; but what it did, he says, "not only saved my life, it made it possible to actually live my life."

Two years later, doctors weaned him from the oxygen tank he had been using since junior high school.

Then, last November, he started running. He trains mostly on a treadmill but he's run in five road races. Next year, he promises to run in the 15-kilometer Gate River Run.

Meanwhile, he and his mom came up with the idea for the Big Fun Foundation. Their concept: Create Big Fun Boxes that would supply puzzles, toys, games and art supplies to kids going through what Prather has gone through. After a series of tests and focus groups, they've put together a prototype box.

Now comes the hard part, Prather admits. He wants to make an initial shipment of about 100,000 boxes to children's hospitals across the country. To do that, Prather, a marketing major, needs to raise $2 million.

His target donors are companies involved in the health care business that would get to stamp their logos on the boxes they sponsor.

Although he is at the front end of a significant challenge, Prather hopes to make the Big Fun Foundation his life's work.

In fact, he feels about his foundation more or less the way he felt crossing the finish line at the Festival of Lights 5K, his first race.

"I thought, I'm going to be doing this for the rest of my life, doing something other people can't do," he said.